The Zionist state is attempting to bomb the Middle East into a new order. Under the pretext of “regional stability,” Israel is accelerating a project far older than the current war: the restructuring of West Asia to accommodate its expansionist vision. The deliberate engineering of a “New Middle East” based on fragmentation, normalization, and U.S.-sponsored militarism creates the necessary conditions for the advancement of the Greater Israel project. Understanding the foundations of such a plan is crucial to apprehend the continuous Zionist violence during the past two years.  

The post-October-7 regional structure has witnessed open aggression from Israel on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Tunisia, and Qatar. More than 17,000 attacks have been carried out since October 7 on the Levant alone. While U.S. sponsorship allows Zionist aggression to thrive, U.S. and Israeli politicians have been reiterating the “New Middle East” mantra. The term, first used by former Zionist President Shimon Peres after the Oslo Accords, describes the manufacturing of a regional realignment based on Israeli-Arab normalization, economic integration, and a unified front against Iran, marginalizing the Palestinian cause.

The advancement of normalization is concentrated on Arab states relatively distant from occupied Palestine. Neighboring states, on the other hand, especially Lebanon and Syria, are direct targets of divide-and-conquer strategies, in which their fragmentation eases Zionist military expansion. The expansionist nature of Zionism has its foundations in the aspirations for a “Greater Israel,” the idea of a Jewish state spanning the territories of Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, the Sinai Peninsula, and parts of Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

Origins in Theodore Herzl and Revisionist Zionism

The borders of Greater Israel, however, are not consistent among all expansionist thinkers. Theodore Herzl, the “father of Zionism,” laid the groundwork for a Jewish state influenced by Hebrew biblical allusions to a vast territory. The land promised to Abraham’s descendants in Genesis 15:18 stretches from, as he writes, “the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.” The Balfour Declaration (1917) specifies the land of “Palestine” to become the organized Jewish state granted by Britain, but Israel has never produced an official documentation of its borders. While certain treaties have recognized borders between Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt, Israel’s actual borders remain unsettled. In his diaries, Herzl wrote that “Our slogan shall be: The Palestine of David and Solomon.”  

Political representation of the Greater Israel project primarily resurfaced through right-wing and revisionist Zionism. With the latter’s founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky, expansionism became a non-negotiable principle, claiming a Jewish right to Jordanian territories as well. Paramilitary groups linked to the Revisionist movement, such as the Irgun and Lehi, adopted the Greater Israel map as their official emblem. The Likud party, founded by Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, now led by Benjamin Netanyahu, adopted this ideology as a military objective. Political emphasis even amplified after the 1967 Six-Day War, providing ideological justification for the settlement movement in the West Bank and Gaza. 

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